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I don't hire unlucky people

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#271

Post by raganwald »

pg wrote: post #267
raganwald wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consistently write long essays and I lack the patience to edit them to manageable length. More importantly, I lack the moral fibre to discard perfectly good points. Any fool can chop filler out of an essay. It takes an author of sterling character to discard perfectly good ideas in the interest of making what remains an even better essay. And I lack that character. Having written words about an idea I like, I find…

Try footnotes.

Thank you![1]

[1]: Really!

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#272

Post by pavel_lishin »

davidkatz wrote: post #178
pavel_lishin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.

Right. Our current goals is to help employers with their existing candidates. I have a question - would you like to be able to get a profile on skills? If so, what would you do with it? Thanks!

I'm more curious as to how it finds me. I guess these days everyone's various accounts are pretty interlinked, and you can mine 80% of data from github and twitter.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#274

Post by opwernby »

There's a simple way to hire a good programmer: get a good programmer to interview the candidate. Real programmers recognize each other within seconds: it's like vampires. Something about a look in the eye and total arrogance. Hard to explain. But all the really good programmers I've hired over the years have had three-second interviews: it was just obvious. In my experience, if the interview needs to last any longer than that, you'll end up having a problem with the candidate.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#275

Post by opwernby »

If you want to hire a good programmer, get a good programmer to interview the candidate. The interview should take about three seconds: any longer than that, and your candidate's a bust. Real programmers recognize each other on the spot, like vampires. It has something to do with a look in the eye coupled with total arrogance: it's hard to explain, but over the course of my career (30 years) I've found that those programmers I've hired on instinct, just because I recognized what they were immediately, were the only ones who ended up being totally capable.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#277

Post by Fatman13 »

raganwald wrote: post #144
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling. As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly a…

I agree with everything you are all saying. What I was trying to claim is that there’s a relationship between heuristics and the ham/spam ratio of the documents being classified. When there is very little ham and a lot of spam, my claim is that false negatives are extremely expensive. When the benefit of hiring is very high and the cost of interviewing is low, my claim is that false positives are relatively cheap. Gi…

yar i guess those noise is just to give the picture of a seemingly successful person and make people fall for its crap.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#279

Post by Fatman13 »

sanderjd wrote: post #211
erikb wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like in every skill you need to choose your heuristics carefully and like in most jobs, HR and CTOs often aren't the best. That doesn't mean the whole idea is crap. The thing about formatting I can't answer if you are right or "most HR people" are right. The argument they bring seems as legitimate as yours: People who care about the looks of their result are more disciplined, probably faster (because they get the con…

> It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience than you and me. Having data does not imply usefully analyzing it, and "experience" is nothing more than a plurality of anecdote. Without actually seeing the data, I think your best guess here should be 50/50, rather than the very biased-toward-the-high-end "more likely (of course not 100%)" that you have. Appeal to authority is especially dan…

thumbs up!
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